Sony Pictures has unveiled the new Spider-Man: British pretty boy Andrew Garfield, star of the upcoming movie The Social Network. The studio dropped old-Spider-Man Tobey Macguire and his director Sam Raimi thinking that project would be too expensive, so they’re rebooting the series with the lesser known Garfield and 500 Days of Summer director Marc Webb at the helm. Instead of continuing the Spider-Man series, the next movie will start the story over, telling us one more time how the silk slinging superhero got to be so silk-slingy.
We’re all in favor of rebooting the Spider-Man series, because Spider-Man should be way awesome than that third movie, but we’re skeptical. This Garfield guy’s biggest roles have been The Other Boleyn Girl and the upcoming chick flick Never Let Me Go, and the director’s only big movie was 500 Days of Summer. But Spider-Man is a superhero, not an emotionally torn girly-man. Spider-Man 3 blew because it was too weepy and emotional, but Sony says the reboot will focus on “a teenager grappling with both contemporary human problems and amazing super-human crises.” That sounds too much like Twilight for us to get excited quite yet.
The movie is set for release July 12, 2012, so hopefully this Garfield guy isn’t the Mayan God Quetzalcoatl and this movie the long-prophesied beginning of the end times. Hopefully.